Electricity Saviour

At the heart of most Green IT initiatives is saving of electricity. These objectives are noble and helpful to the larger economic and ecological issues of global warming and resource conservation. With the current infrastructure, electricity consumption often equates to proportionate carbon emission. In some places, like central London, the power grid is so maxed out that companies cannot even obtain more electricity if they wanted and that creates a unique business imperative to conserve those volts which can be delivered.

But electricity is not the problem in the larger context or in the long term. In fact, in most respects is will be one of the critical saviours to our remedy of (a) climate issues brought on by carbon emission, and (b) hydrocarbon (petroleum and natural gas) dependence and increasing scarcity. You see, the thing is, mankind knows how to make clean and renewable electricity in many ways. Nuclear (clean from a carbon sense if that is the imperative), hydro, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal. All of these can produce serious amounts of electricity. We recently discussed on one of Microsoft’s internal forums the proposition that the Death Valley desert covered in solar cells could power the entire USA current electric consumption. And it does not take any major leap of innovation like fusion or other pipedreams of technological discoveries that are going to come along and save us from our profligacy.

Most of the challenges are logistical and engineering oriented. Electricity has significant challenges with regards to distribution and storage. Especially imagine the monumental undertaking of transforming the infrastructure for the largely petroleum-based transportation to be largely electric and for the largely petroleum and natural gas based heating (eg. household and cooking) to be largely electric. While they are not dismissible, they are manageable with investment and ingenuity.

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